My take on the Tai Le/Tai Nüa/Dehong Dai script which is used mainly in the Dehong region in southwest China. The relative blockiness of the letters made it a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment.
Tai Le was added to the Unicode standard in version 4.0 in 2003. This font however uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters. Thanks to the limited number of letters (for a Brahmic script) the mapping mostly makes sense. Aspirated plosives are mapped to upper case and tone markers to shift+digit. The latter have been mapped so that they work on both US and Swedish Mac keyboards (and hopefully many others). Luckily there were no conflict between the two.
The script is an abugida: a syllable-initial consonant letter has an inherent vowel ‹a›. Whether a consonant is initial or final has to be inferred from context, however only ‹p›, ‹t›, ‹k›, ‹m›, ‹n› and ‹ng› can appear in final position.
(The letter pair ‹tone 2› + ‹ka› could really use some kerning.)
My take on the Mongolian 'Phags-pa script designed by the Tibetan monk Phagspa in 1269, based on the Tibetan script, to write Mongolian, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Chinese. This font is based on the Tibetan style which consists almost entirely of straight lines and right angles. It seemed like a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment. I've added rounded corners and serifs to make it more visually interesting.
The script is written in vertical columns top-to-bottom and left-to-right and thus needs to be rotated 90° clockwise and the columns then reversed.
'Phags-pa was added to the Unicode standard in version 5.0 in 2006. This font however uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters which admittedly doesn't always make sense. I kind of gave up in the end and started assigning a bunch of letters to digits. Letters are connected into syllable block by a thin line (mapped to '-'), usually on the right-hand side. A straight line clashed wth the serifs so I made it into a small arch.
The script is an abugida: the vowel ‹a› is inherent in each syllable and thus not written.
My take on the Mongolian Horizontal Square script designed by Mongolian spiritual leader Zanabazar to write Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit. It's based on the Tibetan script. The script consists mostly of straight lines and right angles and seemed like a prime candidate for a FontStruct treatment. I've added rounded corners and serifs to make it more visually interesting.
The script has been accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee for inclusion in a future version of the Unicode standard*. This font uses an ad-hoc mapping to Ascii characters: upper case for aspirated plosives, 'f' and 'q' for retroflex plosives and a lot of mappings that make even less sense as I started to run out of Latin letters. The mapping is based on Sanskrit and Tibetan; Mongolian uses some characters differently. However, the font does not do stacked consonants required by the two former.
The script is an abugida: the letter ‹a› is inherent in each consonant letter and the vowel is then modified using diacritics. Initial vowels are written with a special letter, mapped to 'A', that's wider than the rest and has its own set of diacritics, mapped to digits 0–9.
* http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14024-zanabazar-square.pdf